Amazing CGI

I saw District 9 this weekend. Quite a good movie. Memorable CGI generated aliens “the prawns”. Quite an improvement from aliens that are clearly people with lots of makeup and fur suites, quite an improvement over using muppets and other robots/puppets. The aliens appear to move naturally, they have insect like mouth parts that are constantly moving and bodies that clearly an actor couldn’t fit into. Good work to the Vancouver company Imagine Engine that created them. The aliens fit right into the film and are completely realistic.

The I was blown away by the trailed for Cameron’s new movie Avatar which is coming in December. Again huge amounts of CGI creating a truly alien but beautiful planet and creatures. Really amazing how realistic these imagined worlds are becoming.

Even on standard PCs today with relatively inexpensive graphics cards from NVidia or AMD, its amazing the level of realistic graphics you can get in modern computer games. Each frame in the movies mentioned above might take hours to render to get the desired quality, but computer games today aren’t far behind and rendering 30 frames a second on current graphics co-processor cards. These cards often have 1 gig of their own memory and hundreds of parallel processors doing all the 3D calculations.

It looks like with modern movie making technology, truly whatever can be imagined can be created. Currently it might be limited to big budget productions cost $100 million to make. But prices keep coming down, techniques keep getting cheaper. Next we’ll see movies less expensive to produce, we’ll see this technology incorporated into video games. Should be amazing to see the crop of movies that start appearing over the next few years.